Advanced Dungeon Queue

chvner · April 2023

Very often it turns out that there are dps who have an item level of 30.000-45.000. And it’s clear that they can’t do anything, because in Advanced Dungeons Queue, where the mechanics are sharpened for damage (for example, the first and second bosses in Castle Ravenloft, the second boss in Tomb Of The Nine Gods, the first boss in Lair Of The Mad Mage, etc. ). Raise the minimum item level to 50.000, this will be an adequate solution to the problem. For 20.000-40.000 item level there is Dungeon Queue. And now you are forcing those who have already dressed up to 70.000-80.000 item level to waste time and babysit those who have 30.000-40.000 item level. For example, I didn’t donate a lot of money for this, in order to quickly raise the item to the level.

ksell · April 2023

A rather bad design fo randoms is one thing, but ur problem is another. Nobody is forcing anyone anywhere. Be it dungeons or trials one can get radAD/seals form each and any that is at the moment is possible to beat easy and/or fast enough.
Just go to PE and form a team by yourself.

rikitaki · April 2023

What IL are the RAQs capped at anyway? Because if the cap is lower, 50k requirement wont do anything. (for example ancient dragons have entry at 22k and cap at 55k)

Furthermore, 50k can easily be a char fresh out of leveling with seals of the north gear and Assassin set. No mythic art, no mount power, no mythic companion. Just a few cheap and pointless enchantments out of AH and a mess of the cheapest purple companions. Pointless 1500+ IL rings, shirts and pants are nowadays under 1k AD, so pretty affordable too.
Yes, it is 50k+, but still completely useless. (be glad that those are at least lvl20 chars with all powers at their disposal)

rockster · April 2023

It's common to see someone who doesn't have the dps to do these ones and often if there's a couple at the same time which does also happen, it prevents the entire party from getting through it even if one dps has extremely high dps. In this case u have to abandon the instance and everyone wastes their time which can be quite substantial for some of them to get to that point, boreworm for instance. I support raising the IL. But if not that, scale people up if they're not high enough like u already do for other things.

fritz · April 2023

The issue isn't item level since all random dungeons scale. HAMSTER builds at 60k perform as badly as HAMSTER builds at 20k item level. This "let's raise the entrance barrier" has been brought up multiple times when the actual solution to the problem is simply making the dungeons a bit easier.

However, there is some relation to item level as players with higher values tend to also have better builds. And that's where the more elegant approach comes into play. Neverwinter's gear progression looks something like this:

- First Item: You get way too few stats in very rare cases
- Second Item: +5% Action Point Gain after killing an Abyssal Chicken
- Third Items: You get 3% to all your percentages when all your stats can be divided by 7
- Fourth Item: Every once in a blue moon a creature will spawn that pretends to be fighting for you but doesn't actually deal damage
- Fifth Item: Whenever you heal a player or damage a target for more than 10% of your Hit Points you get +1.5% to Critical Strike and Critical Severity. This effect stacks up to 5 times.

That's exaggerated, of course, but you really only start your build with the current endgame / bis items. Everything you can realistically get before that is trash or close to. I'm not sure why you can't gradually work towards you build at very early item levels. There should be items with lesser versions of Ruthless Advantage / Might etc. that give 0.25%, 0.5%, and 0.75% to stats. You know just like Enchantments where you can very early get the basic version and gradually upgrade towards your final build.

You can still have bad performers in the queue, but at least players would have a shot at sporting an actual build instead of just items that give them the best item levels.

rikitaki · April 2023

@fritz Well, the "ruthless" buffs are totally useless for developing chars. You actually need a couple of +damage companions and a pretty good critical severity to trigger them reliably. Once I ran a ME with a guy who was happy to have such piece and on the combat tracker I saw he triggered it once in the whole run by a daily.

The thing is, IL (even if we put aside the caps) is about the base damage and base HP. 25k versus 50k, that is 2x improvement. But by having good bonuses/stats, the multipliers have no problem to outweigh that difference. It does not take much mind bending to come up with builds where a 25k IL guy performs better than the 50k one.

But we are really in the age of high IL gear pieces with worthless benefits. Therefor, IL has no purpose for determining your capability to run any content. Entitlement, yes. Ability, no.

fritz · April 2023

rikitaki said:
@fritz Well, the "ruthless" buffs are totally useless for developing chars. You actually need a couple of +damage companions and a pretty good critical severity to trigger them reliably. Once I ran a ME with a guy who was happy to have such piece and on the combat tracker I saw he triggered it once in the whole run by a daily.

You could also lower the damage threshold for upcoming chars. There are possibilities to smoothen the gear curve.

rikitaki said:
But we are really in the age of high IL gear pieces with worthless benefits. Therefor, IL has no purpose for determining your capability to run any content. Entitlement, yes. Ability, no.

Agree but the game does a poor job handing out gear pieces that matter below bis. And IL gating is very much a thing. The newest content is (soon) 55k, and I doubt you'll reliably get groups for anything below that threshold as well. I don't blame players to blindly chase item level until they can finally think about an actual build.

callumf · April 2023

chvner#3265 said:
Very often it turns out that there are dps who have an item level of 30.000-45.000. And it’s clear that they can’t do anything, because in Advanced Dungeons Queue, where the mechanics are sharpened for damage (for example, the first and second bosses in Castle Ravenloft, the second boss in Tomb Of The Nine Gods, the first boss in Lair Of The Mad Mage, etc. ). Raise the minimum item level to 50.000, this will be an adequate solution to the problem. For 20.000-40.000 item level there is Dungeon Queue. And now you are forcing those who have already dressed up to 70.000-80.000 item level to waste time and babysit those who have 30.000-40.000 item level. For example, I didn’t donate a lot of money for this, in order to quickly raise the item to the level.

I tend to agree mostly.

Sure you can form your own group, but the game mechanics are there to promote random runs with random players.

I don't tend to run RADQ these days as its all about the bosses.

Its easy to waste 30 minutes to get to a boss that you cant defeat due to whatever reason.

rockster · April 2023

I run LoMM these days only to try for the Arcturia pet, so I'm lucky it's the first boss. If everyone quits at the worm I don't give a stuff.

rikitaki · April 2023

fritz#8093 said:
... And IL gating is very much a thing. The newest content is (soon) 55k, and I doubt you'll reliably get groups for anything below that threshold as well. I don't blame players to blindly chase item level until they can finally think about an actual build.

Yep - and you can "fluf" your IL way past 70k without touching things that actually bring you some benefit. (companions, main art, combat mount power - and gear bonuses) That is why I think there really is no point at gating RADQ at 50k IL. IL is a completely empty number, detached from the effects of used items. (Prime example is the combat enchantment, which, with now the sole exception of Lightningflash at mythic quality, is designed to take away roughly the same it brings in - plus it screws the other off/deff side of your char.)

rockster#6227 said:
I run LoMM these days only to try for the Arcturia pet, so I'm lucky it's the first boss. If everyone quits at the worm I don't give a stuff.

Worm mechanics is broken - it asks you to group up, but wipes your group if you do so. Abandoning that fight is not a question of performance, but inability/refusal to use a glitch.

rockster · April 2023

That's not the way to do the worm, though many people think it is and they tell everyone to stand at the door etc but it's not the right way to do it, or at least the best and most problem-free way. I know the arrows stand for hypothermia which is well-used throughout the game and has a share-the-damage functionality to it, and this does work here too, but the correct way to do the worm is for the tank to stay near the worm (in one place, not running around) and hold aggro on their own while the healer stays reasonably near, but not too near to grab the aggro, and heal the tank, and everyone else just stays the F away and dodges falling rocks which is easy because u get a warning in plenty of time to dodge out of the way back and forth.

If someone else happens to get the arrows they should run to the tank and swap it back by standing with them for a moment then moving away, not to the doorway, not to other people, not around in circles like a headless chicken in a panic because u will die for sure that way and falling rocks will stop anyone else reviving you, you run directly to the tank who is hopefully standing and waiting near the worm. You run to them and stand there until the arrows stop flashing then move away, they should then go onto the tank, but if the arrows follow you, you go back to the tank again and keep doing it until the aggro stays with the tank, after which it's a piece of cake to get through as long as the healer is doing their job. Sometimes (not often but sometimes) the aggro stays with the other person and refuses to go back to the tank, in which case you just stay with the tank and share the damage.

I've done LoMM a million times from start to end as healer and now recently started doing it as tank as well, the worm can be very smooth and easy if you do it right. It also needs good dps so it doesn't take so long u get the third phase and more golems which hit like trucks. But if the tank has good aggro they can run around and grab all (most) of the golems together and keep them busy while the dps get rid of them, and leave one for the worm, because if the worm doesn't kill one of them you do get the third phase.

rikitaki · April 2023

@rockster That is a nice theory, but the practice is that the arrow lands on a random person and the person dies. Then another, then another. What you describe requires skill, luck and not being a glasscannon at the same time - which will not happen in an average RQ in a capped content.

Unless you dodge one tick of damage and shed the arrows at the door, you die. If you share the damage with someone, healer will just smile at you and you both die to a stalactite.

The mechanics requires either guaranteed land on the aggro holder - with the tank somehow retaining the aggro on the worm through the intermezzo, or a significant reduction of the falling rock damage to be "RQ" passable.

For RQ, it is a broken mechanics. From history point of view, it is a broken mechanics, because it worked before. For a new guy? It is not even a mechanics, just a mess. From the Neverwinter mechanics perspective, it is broken too, because "hyppo" always asks you to group up - an it is a wipe if you do it here.

rockster · April 2023

It's not a theory I run that dungeon all the time as both healer and tank and that's how it works. The aggro from the worm (which shows as the hypo arrows) is swappable. As a healer I got it quite a few times and I run to the tank and give it back then move away and the tank does the remainder.

rockster · April 2023

The falling rocks by the way are totally avoidable. Just before they come down on you your character does an animation where it bends a bit and jerks and just after that they fall on u, u have enough time to get out of the way easily. While I'm healing the tank a distance away and get the warning of the rock, I just dodge one direction and it's far enough away to not get hit, I just stand there and when the next one comes, I dodge in the opposite direction and it misses me again, I just go back and forth from one spot to the other and back again, it's no drama. No-one has any excuse to be hit by those falling rocks and if they do they're just not paying attention. If you just stand still you can tell when they're coming from that movement your character makes and just scoot out of the way. When they do become bothersome is when someone dies and someone else tries to revive them, I've seen this happen so many times and it's always the same, the system knows someone is there trying to revive and keeps hitting them and doesn't give them enough time to be revived, it's a guaranteed die. Usually it happens when someone gets the aggro and runs off on their own in a panic and dies and someone else runs up to them to revive and the rocks start coming thick and fast on the same spot, because as I say, the system knows what's going on and they've programmed it so you don't have the time to revive someone. It's like clockwork when it happens, always the same and obviously intentional. The answer to that like when you can't get to the tank to swap it back because ur too far away is either to have a soulforged on so if the arrows do kill you and you can't get to the tank you revive yourself and the aggro leaves you instantly alone and moves to someone else so you can just run off and pop a potion, or have someone else with Eye of Lath equipped which I use as a healer in there as well, so someone can revive you from a distance without having to be in the path of the rocks themselves and get bombarded over and over trying in vain to revive. If I remember, the next time I do it I'll video it so u can see how it's supposed to go.

rockster · April 2023

And I don't really care how it used to be in the past, I'm saying how it goes now, and how you can run it smoothly each and every time.

fritz · April 2023

Think the point @rikitaki is trying to make is that random queues shouldn't require deep knowledge of mechanics. I just today joined a queue that failed to beat Cradle. This simply shouldn't happen.

rockster · April 2023

Well yea that's another story. I've never been a fan of forced randoms in the first place.

callumf · April 2023

fritz#8093 said:
Think the point @rikitaki is trying to make is that random queues shouldn't require deep knowledge of mechanics. I just today joined a queue that failed to beat Cradle. This simply shouldn't happen.

Um I partly agree, partly disagree.

Cradle has a number of specific mechanics which need to be done correctly or it will fail.

Like the discussion above about the Bore Worm all mechanics can be "learnt" but that takes effort and communication.

Admittedly Cradle mechanics [hit the skull, drag the cubes] are child's play mostly but the push pull still kills me sometimes due to lag etc

fritz · April 2023

For me it's more an issue of game design. I don't wanna babysit players but challenge can be had elsewhere. Random Queues is a farm system and time sink. To make matters worse, most dungeons are exactly that until you run into specific ones which suddenly require tactics that the game doesn't teach anywhere.

rockster · April 2023

Here, I ran LoMM today and thought to video it, aggro swapped over in the first phase when I wasn't recording and I remembered about this thread and started recording before the second phase started. You can see after I go and collect all the golems that the aggro arrows attach themselves to the Rogue nearby and not to me, we stayed near each other and the aggro swapped to me and I then moved closer to the worm far away from the others and kept it until the phase was over. If you have aggro in this phase, run to the tank and give it back, it's the way to make it go the smoothest. If the video won't play in this post, just click through to YT and watch it there.

https://youtu.be/9qHHBza3v9E

jana · April 2023

That was a great frigging video Rockster, I never knew the red arrows were aggro. You guys were so smooth in that. In the hell pit there was an aggro companion or tank companion rather, would he help with the aggro? Also all your stuff that you can rearrange with HUD by hitting escape is so small. Mine is huge and constantly in my way except for the way it disappears these days. It is so tempting sometimes to trade what you have for gear that gives you a 100 item level but then you lose 1300 combat advantage. I finally learned not to do that.

I think Fritz was right though, they tend to make these to damn hard at times. It wouldn't hurt to soften them a little, it wouldn't keep people from spending for better gear or whatever at all.

rockster · April 2023

Thankyou Jana. X Yea those red arrows are aggro from the worm, where they are and who they're on, they will get the lighting bombardment and usually die. Those arrows appear all throughout the game, they are usually called 'hypothermia' or hypo for short, I think they first appeared in Svardborg trial but I could be wrong. It usually means whoever has them needs to share the damage with other people and usually the whole party should all run and group together and share the damage using all their hitpoints combined and it doesn't kill anyone and that's the mechanic they offer. But in LoMM while I think they still can share the damage if people group up, and some people like to stand at the door and do that, I've seen too many times where they all die anyway, especially when there are a bunch of golems all on top of them as well as the lightning, even a bunch of people together don't seem to be able to withstand that type of damage and being knocked around by the golems at the same time, it often ends in disaster and the party wipes, it's better in my experience for the tank to handle the aggro arrows on their own while everyone else just stays away and alive and avoids falling rocks. A tank can handle it all on their own as long as the healer is healing them up properly at the same time.

Aggro/tanking companions are only useful (in my own experience) when you're soloing a ranged class (so doing quests on your own more or less on an open map with no-one else around you) and want to stay back at a distance and your companion runs up to the mobs and distracts them early so they don't really know you're there until they're already engaged and latched onto the companion and you can then hit them from a distance while the companion keeps them away. I remember I used a man-at-arms companion a long while ago to pretty good success for this. He immediately ran up straight away a long distance and kept them busy for me while I hit them. I also saw my Mystagogue a while ago aggro mobs and have them ignore me (he has good aggro) and I think others can also do a good job. But that's in solo content with no other players around to muddy the waters. As far as I know, there are no tanking/aggro companions who can compete with the aggro generated in full parties, especially a live tank and this would be for a reason, you wouldn't want that happening, otherwise there would be a tug of war for the aggro between the tank and companion/s and it would drive the real players mad and make it very hard to control the mobs.

Re the hud stuff, sounds like your screen resolution is different from mine and things are larger? I never made the boxes smaller, only shoved the top ones in the middle of the screen out of the way, but I left the boss health one there where it was. If mine look a lot smaller than yours it's likely your screen resolution is different, you can play around with that in graphics settings in the game I think, or if no luck there, try your main display resolution settings and make it larger, so as an example, 800 X 600 would have very large font and icons, but 1970 X 1800 (or whatever it is) would make everything smaller on the screen. I'm getting the feeling that would be your issue and not so much moving them around in hud edit mode.

Gear, I just started making this tank so got the dragon stuff from the seal vendor, and I'm now working on getting the dragon hunt gear from ancients, but I'm using the tank to gear-up my dps and healer first as he gets the quickest queues and the most runs so I have a long way to go before this tank is geared up properly. I know what you mean about the trade-off in stats - IL, I have often stuck with lower IL gear because the stats or bonuses were better than the higher stuff, ur not alone there.

jana · April 2023

Thank you, I am glad I didn't get the aggro tank companion, I sure won't this hell pit either. I will try a different display resolution, mine isn't working as well as it could to say the least! Thank you!

rockster · April 2023

Hell Pit people often go for a healer companion to help them survive, but I would tend to go CC like a Mystagogue or Iron Golem to help slow them all down and keep them from swarming on me so much. Other than that a strong AOE type would be good too to help whittle them down. I love Hell Pit. I'm looking forward to it coming back again.

plasticbat · April 2023

For whatever it worth, I am running the game using 2560x1440 with the POV scroll all the way back. Hence, I pretty much can see what else is going on in the other part of the arena. Easier to avoid enemy side combat advantage.

rockster · April 2023

I don't like the way it distorts into a fish eye lens effect.

Advanced Dungeon Queue

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